After Listening to a retreat by Allan Wallace on Lucid Dreaming and Dream Yoga which you can find here in 13 parts (http://www.upaya.org/dharma/) I feel as if i have a glimpse of what the middle way is saying about the nature of reality. Although i have thought of it and even talked about it in the past, i don't think i really understood it until now. Even now I'm sure i have much to learn and experience. So ill share a brief description, feel free to listen to the entire retreat if you some some time to kill, A lot of great stuff in there !
So taking a strictly materialist scientific point of view one might come to the conclusion that all that really "exists" is physical matter. Things have independent proprieties and are there if we are looking at them or not. Why not believe this ? It seems to fit with our experience of reality. If i look at something and turn around its still there when i look again. There is mutual agreement between many people on the proprieties of an object or the description of an experience. So there must be something fundamental about "reality" that has nothing to do with me and i just come in contact with it.
Not so fast! From the stand point of a radical empiricist what do we really experience, what do we really perceive ? Is it the object its self or is it our mental relationships to the object. Do we perceive water ? or are we aware of the sense perceptions that our interaction with the water creates. If reality is made up of matter independent of our perceptions, who has even seen this matter ? Atoms, Molecules are theory's, concepts based on our scientific framework and modes of inquiry. All we know of them is what we can write down or say in relation to our sense perceptions, information that we can extract from them. So what are we left with ? That physical reality is empty of inherent existence and all there really is , is mind and our perceptions.
Not so fast ! How do we account for the changing of the seasons, the growing of a plant, the decay of organic matter. That happens on its own with out our mind needing to perceive it. If all there is, is mind who has ever seen this mind ? When you practice meditation you look deeply into the nature of mind it self. When you can attend to it with awareness and concentration you can ask, where is this mind independent of concepts and independent of what it is perceiving. Is the mind something solid that you can hold on to. When you apply the same consideration to mind as you do the physical world you come to the same conclusion. Mind is also empty of inherent existence independent of causes and conditions. So what are we left with, no matter, no mind ? Is reality nothing at all ?
This is where the wisdom of the middle way comes in. Let us not ask questions that are unknowable in principal. We will never be able to know of matter and mind independent of our own conceptual framework of them, because that is all that is available to our experience. What emptiness is telling us, is that things are dependently originated. Meaning matter and mind both exists and doesn't exist. That they arise together, interconnected, and can not be thought of as something independent of our interpenetration of them. Our very perception makes mind and matter what it is and at the same time what it is creates our perception. The two can not be separated.
Chew on that for a little while see how you feel.
Sat Chit Ananda!
Danny
Friday, April 9, 2010
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